by Dani Collins
With a small sob of longing, she hugged the formless dress to her stomach.
She did want that. A baby. Children. She knew that now. She wanted a family. People who were hers.
She didn’t realize she had closed her eyes until his hand touched her knee and she blinked her lids open.
“Did the doctors say anything about... Are there concerns about future pregnancies?” he asked apprehensively. “I don’t want to put you through that if—”
“No.” She bit her lips together. She had asked those questions herself and found cold comfort in the answers. “They didn’t identify any serious health issue and said my chances of a successful pregnancy next time were exactly the same as any other woman’s.”
He nodded in distant understanding, hand caressing her knee. “That’s something to think about, then. Isn’t it? Trying again, when we’re ready?”
She didn’t need to think about it. She knew that much with unshaken certainty deep in her core. Pushing the dress off her lap, she scooted backward onto the bed.
“Can we try right now?”
“Freja.” He closed his eyes, expression twisting with agony. “We need time.”
“I need hope,” she argued raggedly. “I need to feel something that isn’t emptiness and agony and self-doubt.”
“Tisoru, you know that’s all this would be. Hope.” His voice was tortured, his hands in fists on his thighs. “A thin one! I can’t make it happen every time. You know that. If you’re sure about wanting a family, then let’s do this properly. We’ll renew our vows and see a specialist and find a way. It will be a journey we take with intention, together, every step of the way.”
“A chance is enough for now.” Was it? Not really, but, “If it’s meant to be, if we are meant to be, like you said yesterday, then it will happen for us again.”
“Don’t do that, Freja.” His expression turned grave. “That is far too much pressure to put on a relationship as fragile as ours is right now. Don’t do that to us.”
“I need something, Giovanni! A sign. A message from the universe to convince me that I should stay with you, because my head is telling me I should be in New York by now, forgetting I ever knew you.”
His breath hissed and he swore at the ceiling.
“This morning used up my lifetime’s allotment of good intentions.” He threw away the clothes in his lap and his biceps flexed as he joined her on the bed. “If you want to make love, I will make love with you. Always. But understand that I view this as a resumption of our marriage. You will not get rid of me so easily next time.”
“I didn’t get rid of you the first time, you idiot!”
“Call me names if you have to.” He dragged himself to loom over her. “Pinch and bite me. Get all that anger out because I don’t want it between us anymore.”
“You put it there! You did this.”
“I did.” He sounded gruff, his good leg was crushing her thigh, but his lips were tantalizingly sweet as he pressed airy kisses along her jawline.
“You said I was overreacting. That I was smothering you and acting like a jealous shrew.”
“I did.” He set those tender kisses over her eyes, closing them, and rubbed his lips against her brow. “I was worried. I wanted you away from me, off the street so no one would guess who you were. And you tried to protect me afterward anyway. I don’t deserve you, Freja. I know that.”
So many soft, soft kisses that stirred more than sensual excitement. They crept close to the heart she’d been guarding so very carefully since the beginning. Oh, she had been falling in love as fast as she’d fallen into bed with him. Too fast even to recognize what was happening and put words to it. Then they had been married and all the small secrets began piling up, eating at her, causing her to hold back her tenuous new feelings.
She had fought and fought and fought not to love him, but stunted as his disappearance had left her emotionally, she had continued to yearn for him. For the only man who made her heart lift and race.
She loved him. She had known that when she chased him to Dubrovnik, desperate to know where they stood.
She was still desperate, wanting to fill herself with him. She skated her hands across the ripple of his muscled chest and drank in the rumbling hum of his pleasured noise.
His lips seductively touched one corner of her mouth then the other, finally giving her a tiny peck that was nowhere near enough.
“Why do you always tease?” she scolded, cupping the side of his smooth cheek and urging him to kiss her properly.
He did. Slow and thorough until she moaned in the agonized ecstasy of having him here with her. But for how long this time?
“I’m not teasing, bidduzza. I’m savoring.” He released the first button on her dress and kissed the inch of breastbone he exposed. “I’m reacquainting myself the way I should have this morning. Why are you always in such a hurry? We have time.”
“Do we?” she asked baldly. “Because I have never believed that.”
He frowned.
“You only married me because I was pregnant. You were shutting me out. I thought you resented me.”
“Ah, Freja. No.” He rested his forehead against her chin.
On that fateful last day, she’d asked him, Do you love me? Do you even want to be married? She couldn’t bear to ask it again, fearful of how he would respond.
“I didn’t see how we could last when things were so tense and awful,” she admitted painfully. “When you were disappearing and keeping secrets. I followed you that day to end the suspense of when.”
He made a noise of defeat.
“I wanted that to be over so I could be here.” He slipped another button free. “I won’t shut you out again.” His lips went down as he opened more and more of her dress. “We have time. I promise you.”
She wanted to believe him. She did.
His hand slid beneath the edge of her dress and cupped her bare breast. She gasped, arching as he plumped the swell, exposing it to his pleased gaze.
“My beautiful rebel,” he said with affection for her braless state. He dipped his head and sucked her nipple.
How many times had she dreamed of this? Imagined him in the bed beside her, making love with her again.
“I missed you,” she confessed in a whisper and ran her hands into his hair, savoring him, too. Because they might last or they might not, but she had him now and she wanted to love him with every part of her.
Everything slowed then. Each caress was drawn out, each kiss achingly tender. Each layer of clothing peeled away bit by bit until they were naked with nothing between them but desire that scorched their skin as they moved against one another.
He spoke to her in his beautiful language, kissing every inch of her until she was weak with longing. She did the same, holding back her pleasure so they would experience it together when she was sprawled upon him, taking him in. Joined with him again in the most intimate way. Finally.
In this moment she believed, as she always had, that they were anointed by ancient gods. There was nothing more sacred than the feel of him inside her, their rocking as universal as the waves rolling up the sands of a beach and the sway of trees in the wind.
But this union was only a stolen moment from time. A gift and a curse because eventually the crisis hit and even though it was magnificent, it marked the end.
And even though she was sated and bursting with love for him, and even though he cradled her in his arms as they caught their breath, she felt them slide apart and had to press her eyes closed against hot tears.
* * *
“You have to love the modern news cycle,” Freja said over breakfast the next morning. “Your return from the dead has already been overshadowed by a golf club that has finally allowed women to join, a bitcoin embezzlement, and a kitten rescued from a ledge on a skyscraper.”
�
��How do I compete with such a hero?” Giovanni lifted his head from the market numbers he was studying on his tablet. “Surely I’m more photogenic than a window washer?”
“He was a firefighter and any man’s appearance improves tenfold when he holds a kitten or a puppy. It’s a proven social media fact. Ugh,” she added with a dismayed flick through her feed. “Trolls are saying your faked death was a stunt to sell more of my books.”
“Ignore them,” Giovanni insisted. “Turn that off. I want to show you the estate.”
“I have to answer a few emails first. The publicity team for my book is having a bird that I didn’t warn them about any of this.” Freja frowned. “Tsk. And even though my first book isn’t out yet, I’m being asked for a follow-up. A tell-all about our marriage. No, thank you.” She swiped dismissively, but her tablet continued to ping. “This is ridiculous. Are you being inundated with invitations to charity galas and holiday mixers? I don’t even know most of these people.”
“The advantages of a new phone. I’m sure they’ll find me in due course.” He had had a mind to skip reentering the social whirl in favor of a honeymoon, but he’d forgotten about her book tour. “I’ll make some calls today, begin the search for a new team of assistants. The most inconvenient consequence of pretending to be dead has to be the loss of so many well-trained staff.”
“That’ll teach you. Don’t do it again,” she said dourly.
Amusement tugged at the corners of his mouth. “When are we due in New York for the book launch?”
“November first. Will you be alive by then? You don’t have to come.”
“Of course I’ll be there. Do we factor in a visit to Paris on the way? Surely you need a new wardrobe for it?”
“Does anyone ‘need’ a new wardrobe for anything?” She kept her chin tucked as she lifted her lashes to send a scathing glance at him. Her gaze dropped to the screen and her nose wrinkled. “I’m not even sure how many appearances I’ll have. I managed to cancel most of my interviews when you disappeared. Now that I’m not actually a widow, I’m being asked to reinstate them and do more. I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.”
“My calendar is your calendar. Enjoy your moment in the sun.”
“I burn easily,” she dismissed.
He had missed this. So much his chest felt strained, trying to contain the bubble of lightness inside him. He had missed her facetious asides in that honeyed voice, her white-blond brows that pulled together in concentration, and the fine, angel-blond strands of hair that lifted with static, begging his hand to reach across and smooth them flat.
She looked up when he did, then rolled her eyes and dampened her palm with the condensation on her juice glass to flatten the flyaway strands herself.
He bit back a chuckle, unable to think of a time when he’d felt so content.
Lovemaking after a dry spell had that effect on a man, he supposed.
He sobered as he acknowledged it was so much more than that. Sex with Freja was as exquisite as ever and he was enormously gratified to be intimate with her again, but he was worried about the expectation she was placing on them. He wasn’t even sure if bringing a baby into this relationship while they were still finding their way was the best thing.
Not that he could say so. It would break these fragile threads of connection they were weaving between them with the return to physical closeness. That’s why he’d given in—aside from the sheer pleasure in the act. He knew his limitations and the chance of another natural conception was extremely low, but the intimacy of lovemaking would begin laying the foundation of trust they desperately needed.
He brought her hand to his mouth so he could kiss her palm.
“What was that for?” she asked, blue eyes dazzled, mouth tilting into a pleased smile.
“You’re beautiful.” It was the simple truth. Gazing on her, he felt physical pain at how incredibly lovely she was. At how much it meant to him to have her in his life again.
Her gaze softened to an intense vulnerability, the kind that threw a tremendous weight of responsibility onto him, one of such magnitude, he didn’t know how to live up to it. He had wanted to rise to it, though. That’s what had taken him to Dubrovnik.
He had been hurrying toward his wife and child and a shimmering possibility that went beyond the buoyant joy of orgasms and banter and I’m glad you’re alive. It was deep and wide and so powerful, it could destroy him if he let it. If he embraced it and lost again.
His inner walls shook, but fear clenched icy fingers around him. Fear of yet another loss. He took an emotional step back even as she dampened her lips and her mouth trembled as though she was about to say something. As though she waited for him to say something.
“I say yes to Paris. You deserve to mark your accomplishment with something special,” he said.
It was a mistake. He knew it immediately, even before the light had died from her expression. The thing he feared losing was gone.
“I’ll think about it.” She rose and offered a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Let me make my calls, and then you can show me the estate.” She walked away.
* * *
Freja’s first pregnancy had been a complete fluke. Logically, she knew it wasn’t fair to hinge their reconciliation on something so capricious as another miracle, but even though everything had changed between her and Giovanni, nothing had.
Oh, he had time for her now. In that way things were as magical as their first days together. They swam and toured his estate on an all-terrain tractor fitted for him to operate with his hands. He had a topless Jeep that was also tricked out with a hydraulic ramp so he could drive it while sitting in his wheelchair. He stayed out of the busy city centers, but toured her along the coast, and they stopped to window-shop in small villages and ordered espresso and biscotti at outdoor cafés.
He even took her inland to Piazza Armerina, the town where her father had wandered an ancient Roman complex for a week while Freja learned fencing in a grassy park.
“The infamous bikini girls,” Giovanni said when she suggested he turn that direction, referring to the famed mosaics in the ruins. “I was taken there on a school outing. My extremely high expectations were left unmet.”
She chuckled. “I liked the circus pictures and all the strange creatures, but my attention span was exhausted within the hour. Thus, the fencing lessons.”
“I read all those books of your father’s yet never quite understood what drove him to pursue such a vagabond life. It was his living, obviously, but my father traveled for work and I still knew where I was from. I had a home to come back to.”
A tendril of her hair had escaped from her ponytail and caught at the corner of her mouth. She dragged it away as she said, “Yeah, but if you never have a home, you’ll never be homesick.”
“Is that true?” The car geared down with a small growl as he slowed for traffic. He glanced at her. “Are you missing America now that you’ve made a home there?”
“I miss Sung-mi and Byung-woo,” she said with a crooked, What can you do? smile. “I kept waiting for New York to feel like home, but I actually felt more in my natural habitat when I was traveling with you, waking up in a new city every other day. Granted, you travel very comfortably,” she allowed dryly. Private jets and luggage handlers made all the difference. “But even though your unannounced itinerary changes were really annoying—you do need to work on your communication skills—being on the move feels very normal to me.”
“I don’t want that life for either of us anymore. I want you to feel like this is your home.”
She had pieced that together over these days of his proudly showing her every inch of this admittedly beautiful and ever-changing island.
“Is that unrealistic?” he asked in a guarded voice.
“I don’t know.” Part of her was thinking, Home is where the heart is. That’s why she’d been content mov
ing around with her father and living in a type of lockdown with Sung-mi.
By that logic, all she should need was Giovanni, but her heart was pining.
Because he didn’t love her the way those people had. And if he wasn’t willing to open his heart to her, then she didn’t have a home with him.
CHAPTER NINE
GIOVANNI WAS READING through CVs from his headhunter when Freja walked into his study. Rather than the beach bum attire they’d both fallen into while here, she wore jeans, a pale gray top and a light blazer with pockets—the sort of clothes she wore for travel.
“I thought we decided to stay in for dinner.” They’d only finished their late lunch an hour ago. “You look pale,” he noted. “What’s wrong?”
“I—” She closed the door.
He clicked off the tablet, met her by the chair where she sank down and tried to wrest the fingers of her one hand off the other. She wasn’t wearing his mother’s ring or any other.
Everything in him stilled.
“I’ve decided to go back to New York. There’s a flight from Palermo in a couple of hours.”
“Something with the tour? Everett will be here with my passport tomorrow. We were going to stop in Paris.”
“I don’t—” She shook her head and said in a small voice, “I’m not pregnant.”
The words rang through him like a sonic boom, leveling everything inside him. He firmly set aside whatever emotions rose up in waves around that news and said, “We both know my limitations.”
The timing was wrong, too. He was no fertility expert, but he understood the basics and they’d only started having sex a week ago.
“Freja.” He reached out to still her twisting hands. “There’s no rush. We have time to try again, find ways to tip the odds in our favor.”
“I thought if I got pregnant again, it would mean our marriage is worth continuing.” She stood up and paced anxiously across the room.